Let’s get this baby off the ground

This weekend I read a piece on the Information Management website by Steve Miller with the title of Big Data vs. the Data Warehouse. It’s an old piece, from March 2014.

It was in response to a piece penned by Bill Inmon, titled Big Data or Data Warehouse? Turbocharge Your Porsche – Buy an Elephant, in which he singled out for criticism the ad campaign of a big-data and Hadoop promoter.

Here are three stories that illustrate the connection between creativity and what we do in business. Jacks’ Retail Story, talks about the expansion of retail business; Jill’s Colour Book Story highlights a hugely pervasive tendency, even in these times; and, Martyn’s Summer Story argues that there is a strategic time and place for some things.

I’m in a board room, addressing the assembled bunch of socially challenged IT management and hangers-on.

I explain in simple language how they can and should do Enterprise Data Warehousing iteratively and agilely, and why they should do it that way and not take other approaches. I also explain how to do Business Intelligence, again, both iteratively and agilely.

They, the assembled suits, wring their hands and say “we can’t do it any differently now, we have to deliver everything we promised by September, or we are screwed”.

“The following week the full high-powered delegation from The Taffia Connection and BogartSys fly in. It was if an army had come to do battle with us. Uniformly slick, sullen and tacky. iPhone; laptop; knock-off Marks and Spark’s; check patterns; butt ugly ties; ‘plastique’ shoes; mismatching socks; ‘business’ rucksacks; all weather hoodies; and, worst of all, off-the-peg smirks just begging to be slapped”.

These are my principles for successful Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, and if you don’t like them, I have others. Musings on being led by the nose by experienced practitioners of charlatanry, deception and obfuscation.